When generating an electronic document that will be printed by a print device, one or more fonts may be specified so that the print device knows what typeface, size, spacing and pitch to apply to the various characters of the document. A font is a set of rules and/or parameters that document presentation hardware such as a print device or display device will use to identify the typeface of the characters to be printed or displayed. Example qualities that a font may associate with a typeface include size, style (such as bold, italic, or normal), weight, spacing between characters, and pitch.
Most fonts are designed to be scalable and work at a wide range of sizes so that characters that use the font can be placed anywhere on a page in any combination and/or size. On the other hand, certain specialized fonts such as microtext, Xerox GlossMark® fonts and Correlation Mark fonts are designed to work at exactly one size based on pixel width and height. In addition, many specialized fonts must be placed in an exact pixel position on a page and be rotated only 0, 90, 180 or 270 degrees if the resolution is square (e.g., 600×600 dots per inch (dpi)), or only 0 or 180 degrees if the resolution is not square (e.g., 600×390 dpi). If one particular font works at a height of 240 pixels (which equals 28.8 points on a 600×600 dpi device) it will fail at other sizes.
An example of this is shown in FIG. 1, in which a portion of a document 101 is printed by a print device with a speed setting of 325 and a resolution is 600×600 dpi. In this example, the microtext as printed is under one point in size (where one point= 1/72 inch), although it has been zoomed in FIG. 1 for purpose of illustration. Document portion 102 has been printed after the print device's speed setting was changed to 500, and the resolution was changed to 390×600 dpi. The same microtext font was used in document 101 and document 102, but the change to the print device's speed and resolution caused the font to no longer correctly work in document 102. Some of the glyphs in document 102 (such as the numbers “4” and “1” are still discernible, but others (such as “6”, “0” and “9” have been altered so that they are no longer recognizable.
In addition, when specialized fonts are used, if the pixels of the glyphs are not placed in precisely the correct location on the page, misalignment can occur. For example, FIG. 2 shows a matrix of squares, each of which represents a pixel that can be either filled or empty. The first glyph 201 (“A”) is correctly pixel aligned. The second version of the same glyph 202 is misaligned ½ pixel in both the X and Y directions, and individual pixels may be written in the incorrect position. The third version 203 shows that rotations other than 0, 90, 180 and 270 degrees do not work in this font as the pixels are no longer completely filled or completely empty, as with the glyphs in the correctly aligned version 201.
Thus, when specialized fonts are used across different print devices, a device-specific specialized font must be created for and/or assigned to the device. Alternatively, a complex transformation must be applied to transform a specialized font to the particular hardware that will be used to print the document. This adds complexity in creating and tracking different fonts and files for different devices having multiple resolutions.
This document describes devices and methods that are intended to address issues discussed above and/or other issues.